Koji vs Suzy: AI Research Interviews vs Consumer Insights Panel (2026)

Suzy is one of the most established names in consumer insights. Founded in 2017 and trusted by 400+ brands including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Estée Lauder, Suzy combines a proprietary panel of 1MM+ verified consumers with AI-driven survey design and analysis. It is built for the CPG, beverage, beauty, and retail brands that need fast quantitative reads — concept tests, package tests, ad recall — at panel scale.

Koji is the AI-native alternative for a different — and increasingly larger — segment of the market: product teams, founders, B2B marketers, and researchers who want to interview their own customers (or their own target segment) with an AI moderator that probes follow-up questions in real time, in voice or text, asynchronously.

This guide is for the buyer who is comparing the two and wondering which one actually fits their workflow. We will be specific about where each tool wins, where each one falls short, and what the move from a panel-based platform to an AI-native interview platform actually looks like.

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TL;DR — One-Sentence Summary

Suzy is the right tool when you need a fast quantitative read from a managed consumer panel and you have an enterprise budget for it.

Koji is the right tool when you want deep, AI-moderated conversational interviews with your own customers (or your own recruited segment), starting at €29/month with no annual contract.

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Where Suzy Wins

Let us be honest about Suzy's genuine strengths — there are real reasons enterprise consumer brands have stayed.

Suzy is well-suited for:

• CPG, beverage, beauty, and retail brands that need to test products, packaging, claims, and ads against a managed consumer panel
• Quantitative-first research programs where statistical significance against a 1MM+ U.S. panel is the deliverable
• Concept testing at panel scale — putting a product idea in front of 500 consumers in a few hours
• Ad copy and claim testing where managed panel access removes the recruitment problem entirely
• Brands without a customer database (or that cannot legally use it for research) and need rented audience access
• Suzy Speaks — their newer voice-driven AI interview product, which competes directly in the conversational research space, but is bundled inside the broader enterprise Suzy contract

For a Fortune 500 CPG team running a continuous insights program with a six-figure annual research budget, Suzy is a serious tool serving a serious job.

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Where Suzy Falls Short

The pricing wall

Suzy does not publish pricing. Reviewers consistently report that it is expensive for smaller teams or startups, with custom enterprise contracts negotiated through sales. There is no monthly self-serve plan, and the audience-access component drives costs further once you scale beyond a small pilot.

Koji starts at €29/month for the Insights plan (29 credits/month) and €79/month for the Interviews plan (79 credits/month). No annual lock-in, no procurement cycle, no minimum contract.

Built around their panel, not your customers

Suzy's entire architecture is wrapped around their proprietary 1MM+ U.S. consumer panel. This is genuinely useful if you need rented audience access — and a constraint if you want to interview your own users, customers, prospects, or churn list. Most B2B SaaS companies, founder-led startups, and product teams already have an audience; they need a tool to talk to it deeply, not access to someone else's.

Koji is bring-your-own-audience by default. Send personalized interview links to your customer list, embed them in onboarding emails, or trigger them inside your product. See personalized interview links and sharing your interview link.

B2B and niche segments are weak spots

Suzy's panel is overwhelmingly U.S. consumer. For B2B SaaS research, IT decision-maker interviews, niche professional segments (cardiologists, CFOs, SREs, plumbers), or non-U.S. markets, the audience-access advantage largely disappears — and you are back to recruiting yourself or paying a separate panel provider on top.

Koji works equally well for B2B and B2C because the platform does not depend on a panel — your distribution does. Run B2B customer research interviews at the same per-interview cost as B2C.

Quant-first, qual-second

Suzy's heritage is fast quantitative reads. Suzy Speaks adds AI-moderated voice interviews, but the platform's gravity is still pulled toward quantitative survey work — concept tests, claim tests, package tests scored against a panel.

Koji is qualitative-first by design. The AI moderator is built to probe ("Tell me more about that," "What did you mean when you said…?", "Walk me through the last time that happened") in real time, the way a senior researcher would. That depth is the entire point of the platform. See AI probing follow-up questions and the AI-moderated interviews guide.

Limited methodology breadth for true qualitative work

Suzy supports surveys, polls, and Suzy Live for managed 1:1 interviews and focus groups. But continuous discovery, churn interviews, JTBD switch interviews, win/loss research, and pricing research — the bread-and-butter of modern product research — are not the platform's native sweet spot.

Koji ships pre-built templates for JTBD switch interviews, churned customer interviews, pricing research interviews, customer discovery at scale, and continuous discovery research — each with question structures designed for the methodology.

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Where Koji Wins (Plainly)

1. Self-serve, monthly pricing

Koji starts at €29/month. Sign up, build a study, send a link, and have AI-moderated interviews running the same afternoon. The Free tier ships with 10 credits so you can run a real interview before you ever pay.

2. Your customers, not a rented panel

Koji sends interview links to your people. Your churned users. Your power users. Your enterprise prospects. Your beta waitlist. The depth of insight you get from talking to people who actually use (or actively rejected) your product is categorically different from a panel response.

3. Voice and text, asynchronous

Koji conducts AI-moderated voice interviews natively — see AI voice interviews: the definitive guide and setting up voice interviews. Participants pick up their phone, talk for 8-12 minutes, and the AI probes follow-ups in real time. No scheduling, no time zones, no Zoom-fatigue.

Text is fully supported too — see the text interview experience — for participants who prefer typing, are in noisy environments, or are accessibility-constrained.

4. Six structured question types in one study

Koji supports six question types in a single interview: open-ended (with AI follow-up probing), scale (NPS, CSAT, 1-10 satisfaction), single choice, multiple choice, ranking, and yes/no. This means a single study can mix qual depth with quant scoring — see the structured questions guide. You do not need a separate survey tool to add NPS to your interviews.

5. Automatic thematic analysis

The Koji report runs thematic analysis automatically across every transcript. Themes, supporting quotes, and sentiment surface inside the report without a researcher needing to tag, code, or cluster manually. See reading your research report and generating research reports.

6. AI consultant for follow-up questions

After the report runs, you can ask the AI consultant follow-up questions about the data ("What did churned users in the EU mention most about pricing?") and get an answer with quote citations. This compresses the "I have a hypothesis, can someone re-cut the data?" loop from days to seconds.

7. No moderator bias, every time

A human moderator is good on day one and tired by interview 12. The AI is identical on every interview — same warm tone, same probing standards, same pace. For continuous discovery work where consistency matters across hundreds of interviews, this is non-negotiable.

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Side-by-Side Feature Comparison

| Capability | Suzy | Koji | |---|---|---| | Pricing | Custom enterprise contracts (sales-led) | €29/mo (Insights) or €79/mo (Interviews); free tier available | | Self-serve onboarding | No — sales call required | Yes — sign up and run an interview the same day | | AI-moderated voice interviews | Yes (Suzy Speaks, in newer tiers) | Yes — native, in every plan | | AI follow-up probing | Yes (Suzy Speaks) | Yes — the core of the product | | Asynchronous interviews | Yes | Yes | | Bring your own audience | Yes, but platform optimized for managed panel | Yes — primary mode | | Managed consumer panel access | Yes — proprietary 1MM+ U.S. consumer panel | No — Koji is BYO audience | | B2B research support | Limited (panel is consumer-heavy) | Strong — same per-interview cost as B2C | | Structured question types | Surveys + Suzy Speaks qual | 6 types in one study (open, scale, single/multi choice, ranking, yes/no) | | Automatic thematic analysis | Yes | Yes | | AI consultant Q&A on results | Limited | Yes — ask any follow-up question, cited quotes | | Best fit | CPG / consumer brands needing rented panel | Product, marketing, B2B, founders, researchers |

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Who Should Pick Suzy

Choose Suzy if:

• You are a CPG, beverage, beauty, or consumer goods brand running continuous insights against a U.S. consumer panel
• You need rented audience access and do not have your own customer database to recruit from
• You need fast quantitative reads (concept tests, claim tests, package tests) at n=500+
• You have enterprise budget (six-figure annual contract) and a procurement cycle that fits an annual sales-led purchase
• You already use Suzy Live for managed 1:1s and want to consolidate vendors

Who Should Pick Koji

Choose Koji if:

• You want to interview your own customers, churned users, prospects, or beta list
• You need deep qualitative insight (JTBD, switch interviews, win/loss, pricing research, churn diagnosis, customer journey research)
• You are B2B SaaS, founder-led, an indie product team, or a researcher inside a product/marketing org
• You want monthly pricing without a sales call (€29/mo to start, free tier to test it first)
• You want AI-moderated voice + text interviews with automatic thematic analysis included in every plan
• You want to mix qualitative depth with quant scoring in a single study (six structured question types in one interview)

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Migration: Moving from Suzy to Koji

Most teams that move from Suzy to Koji do not actually replace it for the panel use case. They keep Suzy (or downsize it) for quantitative panel reads, and they pick up Koji to run continuous, deep qualitative interviews against their own audience. The two tools are increasingly used side-by-side — Suzy for quant against rented audience, Koji for qual against owned audience.

If you are doing a full replacement (e.g., you have your own audience and Suzy's panel was the wrong tool for the job all along), the migration is straightforward:

1. Export your existing Suzy study templates and translate them into Koji studies — Koji supports the same structured question types plus open-ended with AI probing
2. Import your participant list — your own customer database, your beta list, your churned users
3. Send personalized links via email, embed in-product, or share via Slack — see interview landing page and interview mode guide
4. Watch responses come in asynchronously over 3-7 days
5. Open the report — themes, quotes, sentiment, structured-question distributions all auto-generated

Most Koji users go from "I need to learn about churn" to "I have a 30-page report with quotes and themes" in 5-7 days, end-to-end.

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Industry Context: Why This Comparison Matters in 2026

Three shifts are converging that make 2026 the year qualitative-first AI research platforms eclipse panel-first incumbents for most use cases:

1. Continuous discovery has gone mainstream. The number of organizations where research is essential to all levels of business strategy nearly tripled in a single year — from 8% in 2025 to 22% in 2026 (Maze Future of User Research Report 2026). This is research moving from "annual brand tracker" to "weekly discovery loop." Panels are not built for weekly cadences against your own audience.

2. AI-assisted analysis is the #1 trend. 88% of researchers identified AI-assisted analysis and synthesis as the top trend impacting UX research in 2026 (Lyssna 2026 UX research trends report). Both Koji and Suzy Speaks deliver this — but Koji bakes it into a €29/mo plan while Suzy bundles it into enterprise.

3. The bring-your-own-audience model is winning. Most product, marketing, and founder teams already have an audience (customers, prospects, churned users, waitlist). What they lack is a tool to talk to that audience deeply, asynchronously, and at scale. That is the gap Koji fills — and where panel-based platforms have a structural disadvantage.

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Final Verdict

Suzy is the right answer for enterprise consumer brands with rented-audience needs and enterprise budgets. It has built a serious moat with its 1MM+ U.S. consumer panel and a respected brand among Fortune 500 CPG teams.

For everyone else — product teams, founders, B2B marketers, researchers, and any team that wants to interview their own people — Koji is the modern AI-native choice. Self-serve. Monthly pricing. Voice and text. AI moderation. Automatic thematic analysis. Six question types in one study. No panel subscription required.

From question to insight in hours, not weeks. From €29/month, not enterprise procurement.

Try Koji Free

The Free tier ships with 10 credits — enough to run a real AI-moderated interview against your own audience and see the report. No credit card required. Sign up here and you can have your first interview running in under 10 minutes.

Want to see how Koji handles a specific use case? Browse the research interview templates or read how Koji compares to other modern AI research tools.